10 Facts about The X-Files that prove everything is a conspiracy

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What you need to know about The X-Files before it returns to TV

The X-Files is back! The X-Files is back! Fox recently released another new teaser telling us that the truth is still out there, and as you may have guessed the government is hiding alien technology. Scully is skeptical and Mulder is a believer. Chris Carter told my fellow Comic Con nerds that the Lone Gunmen are back, and if you’ve seen the posters, so is The Smoking Man. What other truths are out there, you ask?

1. If you work with anyone long enough they'll want your baby

After the season seven episode, “Millennium” when Scully and Mulder had their first kiss, it was only a matter of time before there would be a baby. That’s how the taunt goes, “Scully and Mulder sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes William in the baby carriage.”

2. FBI does not stand for Federal Bureau of Investigation

You have been duped once again by the lure of the X-Files into thinking that Mulder and Scully work for the same FBI as J. Edgar Hoover. In truth, they work for the Federal Bureau of Justice, United States Department of Investigation. That is because it is a federal crime to make fake FBI badges, even if it’s for a prop on a hit television series.

3. Nothing is true unless "a mole" tells you it is

Mulder and Scully go on a lot of wild goose chases running after hunches and suppositions, but the most prolific leads are the tidbits given to Mulder by a series of “moles” who for some god-forsaken-reason can’t do anything for themselves.

4. Bruce Campbell was supposed to be Fox Mulder, until he wasn’t

It’s hard to imagine the X-Files without David Duchovny as Fox Mulder, but that almost happened. Duchovny was working on his Ph.D. at Yale taking acting classes on the side. That’s when David Lynch cast him as Denise Bryson on Twin Peaks. Up until that point, when TheX-Files was pitched, the network executives wanted main sci-fi go-to-guy, Bruce Campbell but when Duchovny came in to audition, Chris Carter knew he found his Mulder.

5. If you argue with your sister over what to watch on TV, aliens will abduct her

In 1973 when Fox is left to watch his younger sister, Samantha, she tries to change the channel while he’s watching the Watergate scandal unfold. He then insists that he’s in charge and will be watching The Magician next. She screams at him and then the lights go out. Moments later, she is floating away, off to alien-land.

6. If you can see into the future, you'll die by the end of the episode

The X-Files has several recurring themes. “People who can see into the future” is just one of them. However, if you are the clairvoyant, psychic-like person, you likely won’t make it until the end of the episode. Remember Death row inmate Luther Lee Boggs (Brad Dourif), Pusher (Robert Wisden) or Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle)? There were so many more, but none as sad as Clyde, the insurance salesman and reluctant psychic who sees his own death.

7. Aliens can be human-hybrids or just aliens

For decades, TV aliens were little green men, or little grey men. The X-Files has seen an array of alien creatures, some human-like, others more traditional, but never the same aliens. We’ve seen renegade extraterrestrials with no faces, an underwater alien called ‘Flukeman,’ the Colonist bounty hunter dude who seems more like a terminator than an alien (but is an actual alien) and any number of “creatures” that when we don’t know what they are, we classify them as “alien,” (like the guy who eats brains but works in a fast food restaurant).

8. If you let a crazy person jam a screwdriver into your head, you won’t get brain cancer

If only Scully would have realized this important tidbit. She would have avoided the brain cancer that the government gave her, until the magic chip implant cured her. Months earlier in season four when nutcase Gerry Schnauz tied her to a dentist’s chair, telling her she needs to be “saved” from “the howlers,” he identifies the exact place in her brain where the tumor was placed.

9. The X-Files invented the“selfie”

Sorry Kardashians but I believe the first selfie was season four, episode four, “Unruhe.” Ok, in truth I have no way of knowing if there were other selfies on TV before 1996, I haven’t watched every TV show ever. But I’m going with this as being the first. In the same episode where Scully almost gets an unwanted lobotomy, Gerry Schnauz turns the evil camera on himself, holds it out arm's-length, and takes (probably) the first television selfie in history.

In a classic X-Files move, an entire episode is devoted to the evolution of The Smoking Man. As a matter of fact, the episode is even called, "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man." In it, we learn that the government is in charge of everything.

“I’m working on next months Oscar nominations. Any preference?” The Smoking Man answers, “I couldn’t care less. But what I don’t want to see is The Bills winning the Super Bowl. As long as I’m alive, that doesn’t happen.” And oh yea, Saddam Hussein has The Smoking Man on speed dial.

Expect a six-episode TheX-Files revival to air starting Sunday, Jan. 24 on Fox.